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Customer service is obviously an important part of running a business and, as such, tends to receive a high degree of attention — a happy customer is a loyal customer, after all. Realistically, though, businesses must balance making the customer happy with reasonable costs, which basically comes down to the amount of time given to the customer.

According to a recent Kana blog post, some research was recently conducted to provide insight into emerging customer service trends. Two findings from this research were highlighted: there are 13 named channels supported by contact centers, with an additional 'other' category; and the role of the marketing director is unclear to the general public, but 37 percent of respondents said brand reputation is part of the reason for listening.

To address the first point, there has been much talk lately of companies turning to social media — Twitter and Facebook (News - Alert), mostly —for customer service. Indeed, by some measures, 64 percent of organizations now use Twitter for this purpose. However, older channels are still widely used. Fifty percent use fax as a supported channel, for example, while 80 percent support an IVR (interactive voice response) system.

To put things in perspective, the last official channel to be retired from used was the telegraph. Furthermore, while a large number of companies are using Twitter (News - Alert) for contact center purposes, this doesn't mean that the majority of customers use this channel.

As for the second point, the role of the marketing director shouldn't be underestimated, but it often is. According to the research findings, not even 10 percent of organizations surveyed put marketing on equal footing with customer service. This is unfortunate because marketing and customer service operate best when considered equal parts of the same team.

The full whitepaper concerning this topic will be released in November, while the two-page research summary is available now.

Kana is one of the top players in customer service software and is therefore one of the foremost sources for customer service information. Indeed, the company's Knowledge Management program can help call centers to run much smoother.

 Recently, the company released the latest updates to its Kana Lagan government CRM program.